University of Virginia Library

13. CHAPTER XIII.
A FEVERISH PATIENT.

THE Pompeian statues in Hayle and Kelso
were on exhibition in a cleared and burnished
condition for nearly a week last spring.

That is to say, Hayle and Kelso were off work,
for high water. It will be well remembered how
serious the season's freshets were, and that Five
Falls had her full share of drenching.

The river had been but two days on the gallop
before the operatives, wandering through their
holidays in their best clothes, began to knot into
little skeins about the banks, watching the leap
that the current made over the dam.

By the third day the new mill was considered
in danger, and diked a little.

By the fourth day heavy wagons were forbidden
the county bridge.

The skeins upon the banks interwound and
thickened. Five Falls became a gallery. Sun-break

had flung back the curtain from a picture
which hundreds crept up on tiptoe to see.

Between the silent, thronged banks and the
mute, unclouded sky, the river writhed like a
thing that was tombed alive. The spatter of the
cascades had become smooth humps, like a
camel's. The great pulse of the dam beat horribly.
The river ran after it, plunged at it, would
run full and forever. It looked as hopeless as
sin, and as long as eternity. You gazed and despaired.
There was always more, more, more.
There was no chain for its bounding. There was
no peace to its cries. No sepulchre could stifle
it, no death still it. You held out your hands and
cried for mercy to it.

Beautiful whirlpools of green light licked the
base of the stone river-walls. Flecks of foam
were picked up in the fields. People stood for
hours in the spray, clinging to the iron railings
by the dam, deafened and drenched, to watch the
sinuous trail of the under-tints of malachite and
gold and umber that swung through. As one
looked, the awful oncoming of the upper waters
ceased to be a terror, ceased, or seemed to cease,
to be a fact. Mightiness of motion became repose.

The dam lay like a mass of veined agate
before the eyes, as solid as the gates of the city
whose builder and maker is God; of the city in
which sad things shall become joy, dark things
light, stained things pure, old things new.

The evening and the morning were the fifth
day. Between their solemn passing, Sip and
Catty sat alone in the little damp, stone house.

The air was full of the booming of the flood,
and Catty laid her head upon Sip's knee, listening,
as if she heard it. The wind was high and
blew a kind of froth of noise in gusts against the
closed windows and doors; but never laid finger's
weight upon the steady, deadly underflow of sound
that filled the night. A dark night. Sip, going to
the window, from whence she could dimly see the
sparks of alarm-lights and the shadows of watchmen
on the endangered bridge, felt a little displeasure
with the night. It was noisy and confused
her. It was wild and disturbed her. The
crowds still lingered on the banks, where the
green whirlpools had grown black, and where the
tints of malachite and gold and umber, swinging
on their bright arms through the dam, had
become purple and gray and ghastliness, and

wrapped the stone piers in dark files, as if they
had been mourners at a mighty funeral. Cries
of excitement or fear cut the regular thud of the
water, now and then, and there was unwonted
light about the dikes of the new mill, and on the
railway crossing, which had been loaded with the
heaviest freight at command, in anticipation of
the possible ruin and attack of the upper bridge.

The water was still rising, and the wind. An
undefined report had risen with them, through
the day, of runaway lumber up the stream. Five
Falls was awake and uneasy.

“I don't wonder,” thought Sip, coming back
from the window. “It 's a kind of night that I
can't make out. Can you, Catty?”

It was a night that Catty could hear, or thought
she could, and this pleased her.

“It is like wheels,” she said, having never
heard but those two things, the machinery in
the mills and this thunder. It carried her round
and round, she signified, making circles with her
fingers in the air.

She got up presently and walked with the
fancy in circles about the little kitchen. It
seemed to perplex her that she always came back
to her starting-point.

“I thought I was going to get out,” she said,
stretching out her arms.

“Don't!” said Sip, uneasily, covering her eyes.
Catty looked so ugly when she took fancies!
She never could bear them; begged her to come
back again and put her head upon her knee.

“But where shall I stop?” persisted Catty. “I
can't go round and go round. Who will stop me,
Sip?”

“Never mind,” said Sip. “There, there!”
All the stone house was full of the boom of
the river. The two girls sat down again, it
seemed, in the heart of it. Sip took Catty's
hands. She was glad to have her at home
to-night. She kissed her finger-tips and her
cropped, coarse hair.

“Last night,” said Catty, suddenly, “I stayed at
home.”

“So you did, dear.”

“And another night, besides.”

“Many other nights,” said Sip, encouragingly.

Did that make Sip happy? Catty asked.

Very, very happy.

For love's sake?

For love's sake, dear.

“I 'll stay at home to-morrow night,” Catty
nodded sharply, — “I 'll stay at home to-morrow
night, for love's sake.”

In the middle of the night, Sip, with a sense of
disturbance or alarm, waked suddenly. The little
closet bedroom was dark and close. A great
shadow in the kitchen wrapped her pictured
dreamer, and his long, unresting dream. It was
so dark, that she could fairly touch, she thought,
the solemn sound that filled the house. It took
waves like the very flood itself. If she put her
hand out over the edge of the bed, she felt an
actual chill from it. There seemed to be nothing
but that noise in all the world.

Except Catty, sitting up straight in bed, awake
and talkative.

“What is it?” asked Sip, sitting up too.

In the dead dark, Catty put out her hands. In
the dead dark Sip answered them.

“Sip,” said Catty, “who was it?”

“Who was what, dear?”

“Who was it that made this?” touching her
ears.

“Him that made this awful noise,” said Sip.

“And this?” brushing her eyes.

“Him that made this awful dark,” said Sip.

“And this?” She put her fingers to her mute,
rough lips.

“Him that learned the wind to cry at nights,”
said Sip.

“Did he do it for love's sake?” asked Catty.
“I can't find out. Did he do it for love's sake,
Sip?”

“For — love's — sake?” said Sip, slowly. “I
suppose he did. I pray to Heaven that he did.
When I 'm on my knees, I know he did.”

“If it was for love's sake,” said Catty, “I 'll
go to sleep again.”

So the evening and the morning were the fifth
day of the great freshets at Five Falls.

Catty woke early and helped Sip to get breakfast.
She was very happy, though the coffee
burned, and laughed discordantly when Sip made
griddle-cakes for her of the Indian meal. Sip
could not eat her own griddle-cakes for pleasure
at this. She walked up and down the room with
her hands behind her, kissing Catty's finger-tips
and her ragged hair.

The Pompeian statues came to the face of the
day; the crowds upon the river-brinks formed

again, thickened, doubled; the bright-armed malachite
and umber leaped again dizzily down the
dams.

Still the pulse of the river rose. The county
bridge shrunk and shivered in fits to it. The
river had the appearance of having an attack of
fever and ague.

The timber alarm, in the wearing on of the
day, waxed and grew.

Five thousand feet of timber, in the upper
floods, had broken loose, and were on their way
down stream.

Ten thousand feet.

Twenty.

Five hundred thousand.

A million feet of logs, in the upper floods, had
broken their chains, and would be at Five Falls
before night.

Catty was sitting alone in the stone house, in
the slope of the afternoon. She had been out
with Sip, half the day, “to see the flood”; lifting
her listening face against the spray, with pathetic
pleasure; holding out her hands sometimes, they
said, as if to measure the sweep of the sounding
water; nodding to herself about it, with her dull
laugh.

Sip would be back at dusk. Catty had promised,
coming home a little tired, to sit still and
wait for her; would not venture out again among
the crowd; would go to sleep perhaps; would be
a good girl, at any rate; stroked Sip's face a little
as she went away. Sip kissed her, and, when she
had shut the door, came back and kissed her
again. A little shopping up town, and an errand
at Miss Kelso's, and perhaps another look at the
flood, would not delay her very long; and Catty
had kept her promises lately. Sip bade her good
by with a light heart, and shut the door again.

Catty sat still for a while after the door was
shut. Then she slept awhile. Afterwards she
sat still for a while again. She got up and
walked about the kitchen. She sat down on the
kitchen floor. She nodded and talked to herself.
Sip might have been gone an hour; she might have
been gone a week; Catty did not feel sure which;
she lost her hold of time when she sat alone; she
put her fingers down on the floor and counted
them, guessing at how long Sip had been away.

Her fingers, when she put them on the floor,
splashed into something cold.

Had the water-pail tipped over? If it had, it

must have been very full. Catty discovered that
she was sitting in a puddle of water; that
water gurgled over her feet; that water rippled
about the legs of the stove; that a gentle bubble
of water filled the room.

She crawled, dripping, up, and made her way
to the door. As she opened it, she let in a swash
about her ankles.

She spattered across the entry to find the Irish
woman who rented the other tenement; she had
gone, like the rest of the world, to see the flood,
it seemed; Catty received no answer to her uncouth
calls; she was alone in the house.

This disturbed her. She felt puzzled about
the water; alarmed, because she could neither see
nor hear the reason of it; annoyed at the cold
crawling that it made about her ankles, and
anxious for Sip to come and explain it.

She went to the front door and opened that.
A rush, like a tiny tide, met her. She stooped
and put her hand out, over the step. It dipped
into a pool of rising water.

Catty shrank back and shut the door. The
noise like wheels was plain to her. It waited for
her outside of that door. It struck like claws

upon her locked ears. It frightened her. She
would not for the world open the door to it. She
drew the bolt hard, in a childish fright, and sat
down again in the slow gurgle on the kitchen
floor.

Suddenly it occurred to her that she might go
and find Sip. But Sip would not be in the noise.
Where would she be?

Catty pushed herself along on the floor, pushing
out of the way of the water as she reflected.
That was how another thing occurred to her.

The farther that she pushed herself the thinner
the gurgle grew. In the closet bedroom it was
scarcely wet.

At this side of the house she lost, or thought
she lost, the noise. It must be at this side of the
house that she should find Sip. Sip had often
lost her out of the closet bedroom. She remembered,
with a laugh, how many times she had
climbed out of that little cupboard window after
Sip was asleep. She felt her way to it eagerly.
It was shut and buttoned. She pushed it, slamming,
back, climbed to the high sill, and let herself
drop.

Catty might have remained in the closet bed-room,

had she but known it, high and dry. The
stone house received a thorough soaking, but not
a dangerous one. The water sucked in for a
while at the locked front door, played drearily
about the empty kitchen, mopped the entry floor,
set the Irish woman's bread-pan and coal-hod
afloat, and dawdled away again down the steps;
the result, it seemed, of a savage and transient
shiver on the part of that fitful invalid, the river.

The county bridge, in fact, was as good as
gone. The transient shiver in the lower floods
had been caused by the sinking of a pier.

It had been a fine sight. Masses of men, women,
and children hung, chained like galley-slaves, to
either bank, intent and expectant on it. Foot
and horse forsook the bridge. Police guarded it.

A red sunset sprang up and stared at it. An
avalanche of dead-white spray chewed the malachite
and umber. Curious, lurid colors bounded
up where they sank, and bruised and beat themselves
against the fallen and the falling piers.

The gorgeous peril of the tinted water, and the
gorgeous safety of the tinted sky, struck against
each other fancifully. There seemed a rescue in
the one for the ruin of the other. One was sure

that the drowned colors held up their arms again,
secure, inviolate, kindled, living, in the great
resurrection of the watching heavens.

It must have been not far from the moment
when Catty dropped from the cupboard window,
that, on the beautiful madness of the river, up
where the baby souls of the cascades had transmigrated
into camels, a long, low, brown streak
appeared.

It appeared at first sight to lie quite still. At
second sight, it undulated heavily, like a huge
boa. At the third, it coiled and plunged.

“The logs! The logs! The logs are here!”

The cry ran round the banks. Maverick Hayle
sat down on a stone and looked at his new mill
stupidly. Passers cleared the railway crossing.
People ran about and shouted. They climbed
rocks and trees to look. The guards on the
bridge disappeared. The smooth outlines of the
boa grew jagged. The timber leaped and tangled
in sweeping down. All through its wounded
arches, the heavy bridge creaked and cried.

The people on the banks cried too, from sheer
excitement.

“The logs, the logs, the logs! The bridge!”

“Look on the bridge! Look there! Good
God! How did she get there? On the bridge!
Woman on the bridge!”

Past the frightened guards, past the occupied
eyes of a thousand people, on the bridge, over
the bridge, not twelve feet from the sunken piers,
stood a girl with low forehead, and dropping lip,
and long, outstretching hands.

“Catty! Catty! O Catty, Catty, Catty!”

The uncouth name rang with a terrible cry.
It cleft the crowd like a knife. They parted before
it, here and there and everywhere, letting a
ghastly girl plunge through.

“O Catty, Catty, Catty! For love's sake,
stop! For dear love's sake!”

It was too late for dear love to touch her. Its
piteous call she could not hear. Its wrung face
she could not see. Her poor, puzzled lips moved
as if to argue with it, but made no sound.

Type of the world from which she sprang, —
the world of exhausted and corrupted body, of
exhausted and corrupted brain, of exhausted and
corrupted soul, the world of the laboring poor as
man has made it, and as Christ has died for it,
of a world deaf, dumb, blind, doomed, stepping

confidently to its own destruction before our eyes,
— Catty stood for a moment still, a little perplexed,
it seemed, feeling about her patiently in
the spray-sown, lighted air.

One beck of a human hand would save her;
but she could not see it. One cry would turn
her; but her ears were sealed.

Still, in the great dream of dying, as in the
long dream of life, this miserable creature listened
for what she never heard, and spoke that which
no man understood.

“She 's making signs to me,” groaned Sip;
“she 's making signs to call my name!”

The Perley Kelso put both arms about her.
Then the solid shore staggered suddenly. Then
a ragged shadow loomed across the dam. Then
there was a shock, and thunder.

Then some one covered her eyes, close.

When she opened them, timber was tearing by.
Spray was in her face. Dirk was beside her on
his knees, and men had their hats off.

On the empty ruin of the sliced bridge, two
logs had caught and hung, black against the color
of the water and the color of the sky. They
had caught transversely, and hung like a cross.